The news of a possible outbreak of war with Germany, using the invasion of Poland by Hitler as an Ultimatum, had crept up on us, few nurses owning a personal radio nor taking a daily paper; those of us too far to visit home regularly not sitting in on family discussions of current events.

Yet aware of a slowing down in admissions resulting in Frances and me, regarded by Night Sister as not having enough to do, being sent to ‘Theatre’ to sort out a jumble of sterilised gloves into pairs, and only to be worn by the ‘dirty’ nurses... staff whose duty was to deal with used swabs and soiled utensils in an operation.

‘Theatre,’ a modern complex of a suite of operating theatres, was on the top storey of an old block, a large space of tiled walls and flooring with a viewing arena for the medical students, tier on tier of seats rising up to the ceiling supported on columns.

Sister Theatre’s office led off, with a silver-plated tea service set out on a tray, in use when the surgeon took tea with her after completing his list.

One wall was of windows, floor to ceiling with what looked like casement windows set in. Using a stool, stepping gingerly over the wash basin, one of a row underneath the whole length of the window complex, I crouched on the wide sill before opening the casement onto a narrow, rail-guarded platform used by the window cleaners. London lay all around, marked out in lights on a dark background, blobs of double rows of lights marking roads, blocks of light and dark tracing office buildings, areas of darkness, clusters of lights like a black map traced with light.

The wind blew hard and the sky was bleached by reflected light. It was exhilarating. I climbed back in, without breaking the wash basin, in time to greet Night Sister, irritated by a sterilizer drum we had left in the middle of the corridor, hoping she would knock against it to give us warning of her coming. But she recognised a booby trap when she saw one. And said so.

My nineteenth birthday had followed a night on Maternity when I had witnessed the birth of a baby boy. My mother and sister had sent a home-made iced cake by post, and celebrating with Frances and Gwen, I cut it in my room and we drank tea.

William sent me a birthday card, enclosing a delicate pocket handkerchief, the lace edge decorated with sailing ships.

Casualty had proved to be quiet, on my four-night tour, the senior nurse booking in those fellow nurses on a late pass, their names recorded in a book kept by the porters in the Front Lodge, just inside the main gate, and again recorded by Casualty nurse, who accompanied the latecomer to the Nurses Home, unlocking the door.

Around two in the morning, a couple of policemen made a regular visit, sharing a pot of tea. Later an ambulance crew brought in a patient, giving rise to a discussion between the ambulance men and the Casualty nurse before she recorded ‘brought in dead’ in the report book.

Saturday night was more lively with women, fighting drunk, admitted from the Farringdon Road area and kept in overnight to sober up in wall-to-ceiling tiled cubicles, never admitted to a ward.

On ‘Children’s’ one morning, sitting beside the cot of a baby very ill with tuberculosis, stimulating his feeble sucking by withdrawing the teat, I fell asleep and so did the baby.

At the end of the three months stint I worked, slept and ate, often falling asleep across my bed, fully clothed.

This was my last night on duty before my first three weeks holiday. During the day doctors had assessed the patients of the medical ward as being fit enough to travel home, providing there was someone to look after them, or too ill to be moved out of war’s way. Leaving the patient to wonder whether they might die first from their medical condition or be bombed.

To us nurses, the reduction in work was bliss, giving time to settle the men down, bring cups of tea to the wakeful, and indulge in whispered chats at the bedside.

‘Staff’ came in, around midnight, bringing two gas masks with instructions that we were to perform our normal duties, wearing a gas mask, for fifteen minutes that night.

In the lighted area of the kitchen, both of us left the ward together, leaving the door slightly ajar, for ‘Staff’ to demonstrate how to put on the mask by thrusting the chin forward, pulling the black rubber over the face and up over the forehead, leaving one’s eyes peering out from the mica-filmed windows.

One’s first instinct was to tear off the clammy thing, stifling breath and speech with its snout-like metal filter. We set this strange contraption on the table, giggling nervously. It must be carried everywhere, at all times, packed in its special cardboard box, slung over one shoulder.

"Nurse, nurse, Hitler’s marched into Poland," the maid cried, opening the door of my room where I hoped to sleep until midday, having packed my case, retrieved from the basement store.

I was on a collision course with Germany, not knowing what to do. In the end settling for leaving on holiday, walking out through the front gates where people were filling sandbags to stack against the windows of the hospital, taking a bus to Paddington station.

Plymouth appeared unchanged. I had a long lie-in on Sunday, followed by a long bath, coming downstairs in time to hear Neville Chaimberlain, over the radio, make his declaration of war on Germany, more in sorrow than in anger.

The set programmes were pushed aside for frequent news bulletins, instructions broadcast to Red Cross nurses, trained V.A.D’s, service personnel, soldiers, sailors and airmen who might be separated from their units to report for duty; but nurses, real trained nurses belonging to prestigious London teaching hospitals, were not mentioned.

In peacetime, Red Cross nurses, volunteering for hospital training, had reported to the Royal Free, bringing a present of cake for the staff, standing embarrassed, a stranger to our busy routine. Often in the way, yet now promoted ahead of nursing staff on holiday.

The next day. Monday, I packed my bag and using my return ticket travelled back to London, sitting in the train feeling secure of my welcome. A voluntary return to duty. Placing oneself in the Front Line, nursing wounded soldiers. To sit waiting outside Matron’s office for an interview.

"I have no work for you to do," Matron said crossly, "No room for you to sleep in. You must go home and complete your holiday."

Home Sister provided my return fare and placed me in the care of a trained midwife journeying to Truro in Cornwall to take up an appointment.

We left from Paddington, the station in darkness, at midnight on a corridor train without lights, pulling out slowly between the platforms glimpsing men working in lit areas, the ticket staff carrying shaded torches, with faint blue lights on the track for the driver to steer by.

It was a very bright full moon, the buildings standing out in relief against a clear sky. At frequent, unscheduled stops we picked up service personnel who climbed into the dark carriage, sitting on the laps of unseen passengers before getting up to join other troops in a fraternal gesture, standing up in the dark corridor, their cigarettes bright stabs of red.

The train, moving slowly, was frequently halted for troop trains to go ahead, often finding signals against it, with no explanation from the guard for the delays; a dark object creeping across the land floodlit by the moon.

We arrived at North Road Plymouth to blue skies, four hours late. I said goodbye to my chaperone and took a bus home.

...........................

Strengthened by my visit home, rested after three weeks, familiar with the boarding school atmosphere of the nurses home, I felt more confident. We caught up on the news. Liz, our jolly Austrian trainee had been imprisoned in an internment camp. Because of air raids interrupting sleep, day duty now started at 7:30 am, not 7 o’clock. The basement of the Nurses Home was designated an air raid shelter, and nurses must wear uniform when roused by the air raid system, prepared to go on duty if required. Nurses sat on one side of the reinforced space, Sisters on the opposite side. There was talk of evacuating the hospital to the country. Rumours were confirmed by a typed notice in the hall, stating that half the staff were to be sent into the country to open up hospitals, ready to receive the flood of air raid casualties certain to arrive.

To our joy Frances and Gwen were part of the contingent, filling two buses, seen off at the front gate by the staff left behind, as if we were heroines off to the front.

What they did not tell us was our destination, the workhouse at St. Albans, with another contingent from a famous London teaching hospital taking over the Lunatic Asylum in that town.

"Just the place for them," we said, "Ideal."

We arrived in time for lunch at the Nurses Home, set like a small country house in park-like grounds. In the dining room the tables were laid with silver cutlery on a starched damask tablecloth, the celery served in cut glass jugs.

The one large sitting room, furnished with soft-cushioned settees and chairs, was divided by screens into an area for the Sisters and ‘Staff’ nurses, and the other half for nurses in training. So that, whilst we could not see them, we could overhear what they thought of us.

The two-storied hospital buildings, built of solid Victorian brick, were spaced apart, set in lawns and concrete paths with black iron outside fire escapes. Some way off was a cluster of cottage type low buildings with tall chimneys, mean windows, and similar black iron fire escapes, not landscaped, the paintwork peeling.

Frances was to be accommodated in the Nurses Home, surely a sign, we thought, that she had been chosen for her quiet behaviour and not one in need of supervision.

Gwen and I were billeted on a middle-aged couple living in a semi-detached house a few streets away from the workhouse. I was given the box-room in front, Gwen the bigger spare room at the back. All meals would be taken in the nurses’ home, and a curfew (on our honour) imposed at night.

Our host and hostess were childless, welcoming us into their home. Because duty times were changed, out evenings were free. I knitted a dress of soft red wool, entertained by Frank, on the piano, who had been an accompanist in the days of silent films. Gwen sang, in a good voice, the sad ballad ‘Barbara Allen’ to our host’s accompaniment.

For six weeks we came on duty in a large pleasant ward, the war intruding in the row of metal folding beds placed down the centre, still leaving plenty of space around.

Each morning, like fellow nurses on other wards, we unfolded the counterpane on each bed, folded the previous evening to its foot, smoothed the wrinkles, and dusted.

We dusted the old-fashioned enamel bedpans - no stainless steel ones now. No steriliser for waste disposal. We were back in Victorian times.

Occasionally someone would topple the stacked bedpans to vary the silence. Work done, we sat in the conservatory filling one short end of the spacious ward, supposedly studying nursing practice but actually knitting, reading, writing love letters, secure from Ward Sister (reduced now to her surname) in the capacious office, probably doing much the same.

The poor, elderly, displaced patients were the first casualties of the war, moved to buildings already condemned, waiting to be pulled down, nursed in beds crammed together, with only a commode behind a screen for a toilet. And nursed by the infirmary staff, male nurses being a novelty to us. In the late afternoon casual tramps were still admitted, men standing in line in the open, to receive a mug of cocoa and two rounds of bread. A roof over their head paid for before leaving next morning by labouring in the large, very tidy vegetable gardens, weeding the long drive or chopping wood before walking off to the next workhouse on their itinerary.

Lectures became almost a welcome diversion. Instruction in first aid, using each other as models, in how to deal with victims of a gas attack, shrapnel wounds, broken limbs. Bandaged, splinted and stretchered we prepared for war.

But no casualties came. On the other hand the sick, like the poor, were always with us. We were to get ready to receive the patients of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, in London, of which it was said only the stoker was male.

The London nurses were to take over night duty for the entire hospital, but for only one month at a time, leaving the Infirmary staff to carry out day duty in their side only.

I was Relief, of course. The geriatric wards in the old workhouse buildings were small, unserved by corridors, opening out of one another. However carefully one crept, rubber soled, the bare plank floor creaked, awakening the old lady in the corner who croaked ‘Pan Nurse, Pan Nurse," bony index finger crooked.

The children’s ward sheltered the babies of the poor, unmarried girls who, once confined, lost all rights to their baby, serving as domestic staff in the Master’s house, or the infirmary.

The babies and toddlers not being ill there was very little to do, though one task was to prepare a cauldron of porridge and serve breakfast at the large table covered with a shiny American cloth.

Someone invented a simple dish for The Meal, slicing the top off a large tomato, scooping out the flesh to mix with scrambled egg. The stuffed tomato, its lid fixed on top, was browned under the grill with a scattering of cheese.

On gynaecology, an acute case had to go to Theatre for a D&C and I was to accompany her to act as Dirty Nurse, picking up used swabs, counted out by Theatre Sister before the operation and to be accounted for at its finish. The swabs, discarded by the surgeon at random, I placed on hooks on a free-standing frame. There was one short. The rows were easy to count, the surgeon anxious.

"Caught in the top of your boot," Theatre Sister told her.

Men’s Medical, a small ward of crowded beds, stuffy from blackout screens slotted in place at each window, knew no peace. Pneumonia patients, plucking restlessly at the bed sheet, open eyes staring, with dried, cracked lips, peopled the ward with apparitions, talking feverishly all night to someone only they could see.

One patient, shaking violently from the effect of gonorrhoea was lovingly visited by his wife. Priggishly I wondered if she knew the nature of his illness.

In a small side ward, isolated, nursed under strict precautions, lay a post-natal patient, admitted from a private nursing home, dying of puerperal fever. Out of her mind, the sides of her bed raised, under constant supervision.

"Poor little devil," her husband said, throughout the night, "Poor little devil."

The orphaned baby was sent to the infirmary nursery, unwanted.

But first year examinations were overtaking us, to be sat, after night duty, in the morning. We sent a deputation to ask the Deputy Matron, who was in overall charge, if we could be excused duty that night.

"No," she said, forcing us to sit examinations after what amounted to a full day’s work. Unreasonable to us. Not to her.

The practical was held in our opposite number’s Lunatic Asylum, their candidates coming to our Workhouse to take their tests.

I was terrified, sickened now with remorse at the hours wasted which should have been spent studying. A woman consultant held my Oral, one to one.

"The Digestive System?" A vast subject, well tracked, simplicity itself. Yet, beyond venturing the thought of milk being digested in the mouth, I sat, speechless, whilst she drew out a writing pad from under her papers and evidently spent the time writing a letter.

The next day taking a second written paper, after a twelve-hour shift, I reported sick, a carbuncle on my hand sending out a distress signal, a thin red line climbing up my arm, on the inside: blood poisoning.

I was seen at once, and operated on by a junior doctor, who passed me fit for duty that night. By morning, trying to wash a patient keeping my bandaged hand out of the water, I was in tears.

I spent three days on Sick Bay, a small, two-bed ward in the old part of the infirmary, still bearing its previous designation – ‘Maternity.’ A fellow nurse and I drank wine, brought in by her friends, that night out of our tooth mugs and we were roused later in the morning than the patients.

On Saturday, William was allowed to visit me, bringing a present of ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ in a slim volume.

To return to ‘Nights’ more difficult to sleep than in London, with the occupants creeping around one’s sleeping form.

The Assistant Matron had the authority to inspect the bedrooms of billeted nurses. I was notoriously untidy, having a mass of belongings: sewing materials, books, study books and folders, library books, knitting and letter writing materials, all to be stored in one small drawer or falling out onto the floor when the wardrobe door was opened.

"I shouldn’t like you to see it as it is now," my landlady said, "I’m just turning it out."

One of the Men’s Medical wards in the new part of the Infirmary was a large ward housing over twenty patients with a six-bedded side ward in an annexe, presided over by me, while the one nurse on duty ate her meal. I returned to my base in the old part, and we were surprised when Staff inspected at two a.m. and not Night Sister. "A patient has died on Men’s Medical," Staff explained, but from covert visits from other nurses and over the telephone we pieced together the story. A patient, clamped to a saline drip during the day, desperately ill, had found the strength to get out of bed, when the only nurse on duty was busy with a post-operative appendix case in the annex, and jamming a chair under the lock of the bathroom, drowned himself.

Fellow patients, noticing his absence, found him and raised the alarm. There would have to be an inquest. At which she was exonerated, supported by friends, who took her off for coffee in one of the town’s cafés, where she encountered his widow.

But my cough was keeping Night Sister awake, we joked, and again I was sent to sickbay and thoroughly examined by a doctor, for tuberculosis was a real threat. I was in the clear but kept in for three nights.

"I think you are catching cold through inadequate footwear," the Deputy Matron scolded. To fill up the gap in the soles of my shoes, I stuffed William’s love letters, fortunately thick and usually written daily; replied to less often.

Children’s, a large complex in a modern building, stood on its own. I came on duty, walking down a long corridor, to find the kitchen deserted, the office empty, lights on everywhere. One wall of the office was of glass, for staff to oversee a side ward where a teenage child lay screaming from the pain of an ovarian cyst. Staff would accompany her to Theatre, a privilege which might have been mine but we were too busy.

In a second side ward off the long central corridor, a baby lay dying of meningitis, its head thrust back in an arc almost bending the tiny body. A young soldier in uniform and his young wife looked on, helplessly, the senior nurse doing what she could.

At one end of the corridor was a large ward with twelve cots drawn up in a semicircle, each tiny patient ill with pneumonia and having to be bottle fed, nappy changed and settled down. Against the rules I could only prop up a bottle in the first baby’s mouth before passing on to the next. There was no time to take the tiny patient out of the cot and nurse it.

Staff, before taking our patient to Theatre, popped in to help, the first baby having lost its feeding bottle before the last was fed.

We had no meal, snatching tea and toast at four o’clock. A six o’clock I turned on the lights in a thirty-six-bed ward filled with children I had scarcely realised were there. To be bed-panned, temperatures taken, washed and beds made by the two of us.

I reached the nurses’ home for dinner late, tired out. There was a message for Nurse Davies to return to the ward and pick up the meal box.

We three passed our State Preliminary examination. On the fly-leaf of Tennyson’s poems, given to me by William, and in my brittle handwriting with a steel-nibbed pen, are the words ‘Marjorie Davies (on Charing Cross Station in celebration of ‘Preliminary’,) with no I’s dotted and no date.

We were fitted for new blue and white striped dresses, crisp and clean, replacing our grey probationer dresses, splitting now under the arms with wear and laundering.

To report for day duty on a Women’s ward, medical and surgical no longer segregated, two twelve-bed wards connected by a central kitchen, office and landing, with sluices and bathrooms leading off. For once we were fully staffed with enough time to nurse conscientiously, without stress and not over-tired.

Every morning, over bed-making, I recounted anecdotes from the ‘Horse and Buggy Doctor,’ set in Canada, in the old times, and listened to by the patients on either side. One of many library books, relent to me by William from his vast store of reading.

Post-operative cases had to be watched closely lest they choke on their vomit, coming to in the ward, to the misery of sickness.

In one corner, isolated near the sluice, was a case of paratyphoid, nursed wearing a gown and gloves, the bedpan disinfected with Jeyes Fluid. Nervously I watched Ward Sister and a doctor eyeing me before I was asked, had I used Jeyes Fluid, for the patient had developed blisters before death.

I heard no more.

A pre-Christmas dance was to be held. I made a short dress of blue watered silk, cut out on the floor of my crowded bedroom, the hem turned up by hand by a patient, sitting up in bed, so as to be in time.

William could not dance. He would not come. Neither could I dance though Sister kindly guided me through a waltz.

A grateful patient left one nurse a pound note, which she used to throw a party but my pound, unacknowledged, bought me a pair of shoes.

It was Christmas day and Happy Xmas was spelt out in the snow on the potato clamp. My first Christmas away from home. All staff were allowed an hour off in the morning, in relays, to go back to our digs and open our presents, otherwise there was no leave for anyone.

Ward Sister thrust a brass dinner gong in my hand, telling me to thump it around the ward, and the surgeon arrived to carve the turkey.

Gastric patients, gazing dyspeptically at a full plate of traditional fare groused... "I’m on a milk diet, you should know better."

In the evening we took the familiar route through the blackout, trying to keep to the concrete path (for a donkey roamed loose), to the Nurses Home for a traditional meal, half a dozen of us accepting invitations to join the inmates in the Infirmary after their dinner. The old ladies, bunching to one side of the hall, wore identical aprons, floral bib topped over a dark gathered skirt, over a dark dress. Not their own clothes.

Opposite them the men stood in grey cardigans over grey trousers, all listening to one of their inmates, sitting in a wooden Windsor chair, reciting "It was Christmas Day in the Workhouse." in its entirety, a tale descending into bathos... "the dried crust wrested from the cur... which would not have sustained his wife" and yet having a ghastly truth for these men and women were separated even though some were married couples.

If times were slack on the ward, we were allowed to watch operations, the ‘theatre’ on the ground floor adapted from a typical ward, sandbags shuttering the windows, the kitchen the anaesthetic room, the bathroom the sluice. No viewing platform.

This was Gwen’s day duty posting, and I asked her what did the surgeons talk about?

"Oh, where to get fish and what boarding school to send their sons to," she replied, wearing a long rubber apron and old rubber gloves over her new stripes, busy packing sterilising drums.

The surgeons, who looked to be in their fifties, were big ladies, their pink elastic hemmed directoire knickers exposed by the rear-fastening operating gowns not meeting across their ample bottoms.

The first incision was the worst moment, for the pale, exposed skin of the patient’s abdomen looked healthy. Whatever cancer lurked underneath, the body looked healthy. The scalpel, skimming down, slicing open the flesh, was like the beak of a bird ripping apart the first layer, the blood staunched by tidy absorbent swabs, retractors holding open the wound, clamps sealing off the fractured blood vessels.

"No need to have taken out that appendix," we said knowlegably, "not even inflamed."

"Who did that?" the surgeon yelled as the operating table shot upwards.

"You did," Sister Theatre’s voice was calm, "You rested your foot on the pedal."

I was suffering from a septic finger, hiding it in the full sleeve of my theatre gown, ignoring the throbbing pain, one of a trio about to witness a gall bladder operation, when a chill crept up my spine, my eyes grew dim, my ears roared as I fainted, coming to; vaguely aware of being carried, by legs and arms, out of the theatre.

To be set to scrub the metal bedframes with carbolic, on fully regaining consciousness, for nurses suffering from septic fingers were deemed to have brought the affliction upon themselves.

The surgeon sent a message to ask after nurse, a very kind gesture, I thought, for she could have been very cross.

On day duty, on the one day a week I had free, and chosen for me, it was easy to journey down to London to meet William, who was a solicitor’s clerk, outside the High Court in the Strand, and follow him around the courts. Eased into the Admiralty and Divorce Division, to listen to Stanley Holloway, a comedian, serious and formal in the witness box. After supper in Lyons Corner House in Trafalgar Square, I caught the last train home to St. Albans.

But ‘Days’ flipped over into ‘Nights.’ I worked my shift, had dinner, changing from uniform in my billet, with no time to wash the smell of the hospital out of my hair and caught the train to Euston Station. As it was Saturday we could spend all afternoon together, leaving in time to go on duty that night, finishing the second night as an automaton, one step behind everyone in answering or moving, or working, but still on my feet.

If I had an evening free, we went to the theatre (the other sort) paying one shilling to sit in the ‘Gods’ before running through the blacked out streets and climbing, in the dark, the long flight of steps to the station. Used to scrambling in at the last moment, we stared at the rear of the train pulling out, before running off to the Underground station to take the late train out to Ware. We walked the seven miles to St. Alban’s on a frosty road in the moonlight, talking, saying goodbye very quietly at the gate of my billet at four o’clock in the morning. In London this might have ended in dismissal, but having my own key, I crept up to bed. At lunchtime the next day, my kind landlady brought me a portion of apple pie and I went back to sleep before getting up for an evening meal.

"Davies, Davies, look what I’ve got," Gwen cried, coming into my room a few days later. What Gwen had was a foetus, a few months old, preserved in a jam jar of formaldehyde to decorate the mantelpiece of her bedroom.

William lent me Monica Dickens’ "One Pair of Feet" which I started to read at breakfast the same night, taking it on duty to read at every opportunity. Placed open on the kitchen table, to read even a few words when frying sausages for The Meal, taking it with me to the Men’s Ward downstairs, as I stood in for the Senior Nurse; not walking around the dark space conscientiously but sitting at the desk reading, dimly aware of the sound of snoring, in that small dark space, like living inside the mouth of a whale as it snorted.

At four o’clock, bringing our pot of tea and toast into the ward, I sat reading, putting it aside regretfully to finish the night’s chores, the book completed, spread out on my lap, over dinner that morning. The best night’s read I ever had.

Monica Dickens, arguably undertaking nurse training for the copy, had been angrily condemned by the Matron of the hospital where she worked undercover, for the often funny but unserious story.

That night I had to accompany a male patient to Theatre, the large, strong young man struggling under the face mask as the doctor attempted to put him under. The female doctor and I did not weigh, together, as much as our patient, who with manic force resisted my attempts to hold him down as the trolley slid across the floor to collide with a dresser. A porter came to help and, when he came round, the patient remembered nothing of this escapade.

A daytime posting to the V.D. clinic meant every evening free but no two-hour break. It was held in a separate building ostracised on the boundary, having its own entrance in a side road so that patients could slip in unobserved. The only other member of staff was a Welsh nurse, nearing the end of her training, who assisted the Scottish female doctor who ran the clinic, for women and children only. Little children, buttocks exposed, learnt at the sharp end of a hypodermic needle the saying "visiting the sins of the father..." and howled.

The department consisted of one large treatment room with a row of toilets leading off, where patients gave specimens of urine, tested in glass hand-held tubes over the flames of a Bunsen burner, any change of colour, denoting diabetes for instance, to be observed and reported.

On Clinic days, the doctor did not leave the premises but took lunch at a small table in the treatment room, hidden behind a screen, waited on by me, with instructions to keep the coffee pot hot by immersion in the boiling water of the domestic boiler. Or that is what I thought Staff said.

To while away spare time, I wove a belt from cunningly-folded cellophane saved from cigarette packets, but largely my time was taken up with cleaning, of the premises, utensils and equipment.

The first task, on coming on duty, was to wash the row of medicine bottles, which I had done when a grim-faced Deputy Matron visited us, suspiciously early in the day. I saw her glaring at a container dribbling its thick white fluid down the sides, an item cleaned by me, used since. There was a whispered conversation between the Senior and Staff with pointed glances at me, later admonished for carelessness.

Matron was to visit us, it being rumoured, she considered us to have rusticated. Standards had fallen. Discipline was slack.

We were drawn up, in the open, in a row for inspection, our pinnies clean, caps set forward over the brow, not clapped decoratively on the back of the head.

She stopped by me, "You are looking better, Nurse," she said. So horrified was I to be singled out, faced with the evidence of familiarity and not the decent anonymity I had imagined, I said the first thing that came to me.

"I didn’t know I was worse."

She glared. "I will start again, Nurse. You are looking better."

This time I replied politely, almost dropping a curtsy.